"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant.
Mr. Nolle is refering to economic theory, right? Well, it's not the internet's responsibility to conform to the theory, it's the theory that needs to be changed to conform to reality. Sheesh.
JavaScript needs to be supported, and turned on as well. I found this out with iCab on the mac, which must be set to say it is IE5 for Windows, and have JavaScript on for it to work. The mac version of Opera not only does not support JavaScript, it does not have iCab's flexability in terms of what you want it to have for the browser id. In iCab, you can set it to anything arbitrary string of characters. In Opera, you can choose "Identify as MSIE 5.0", and it will use the following string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 5.0 [en].
MS IE 5 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)) javascript on: Worked!
Netscape 4.7 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC)) javascript on: Worked!
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.5.1; Macintosh; I; PPC) and javascript on: Failed
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95) and javascript on: Worked!
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC) and javascript on: Failed (strange...)
Opera for Mac v5.0 tp3.298, set to "Identify as MSIE 5.0", which gives a browser id of: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 5.0 [en]: Failed (beta version, probably does not support javascript...)
Minor nit pick, it is not necessary for another bidder to "bid close to your high bid" in order to push you over the reserve price, if you bid higher then the reserve then the "current bid" will reflect the reserve price, regardless of the presence or absence of other bidders. What happened with the microscope is the sellers had their reserve price higher then what you put in for the maximum bid, but were ultimately willing to sell for lower then the reserve price.
I have bought a few things on ebay, and have delt with sellers "offline" who were clearly manuplating the reserve price in order to avoid ebay fees. Clearly it is pretty silly for a seller to do this in the long term, but people do it. What ebay should do is just make it clear that any transaction not within ebay's purview is "at your own risk." (of course, that is the case with any ebay transaction anyway.)
Yes, we Americans are pretty stupid. You would think the sight of nudity would make us melt like the wicked witch of the west or something. If a TV show on a broadcast network or standard cable so much as shows half an ass they need to have a disclaimer. Hopefully one of the canadian channels that we get on cable here in northern Vermont will carry the uncut version. We do get exposed to an occasional boob on CFCF 12. With my luck I will have to watch it in French.
Oh my god! So glad there is another slashdotter that agrees with me on how insane Ruth Dwyer is! I was getting so sick of all of the "Take Back Vermont" bullshit going on in VT, this certainly is way far from the Vermont I grew up in and love.
Likewise!
Fortunately, Vermonters appear to agree with us on this, out of a record setting voter turnout 51% voted for the incumbant Democrat Dean, who supports civil unions, 10% voted for the Progressive candidate Anthony Pollina, who supports full scale gay marrage, and 38% voted for Dwyer. Many of the Dwyer voters cast their vote for her because of her opposition to the school funding law and could care less about civil unions. Many people who don't like civil unions voted for Dean or Pollina because they are simply tired of the divisions caused by the issue, and the classic "live and let live" attitude toward persional freedom that Vermonters are famous for won over in their minds.
The Republicans did manage to take the Vermont House, but the Senate maintained a (very slim) Democratic majority. I think it is safe to say that not much is going to get done legislatively in the next two years.
Today in the Boston Phoenix, Ruth Dwyer and the Take Back Vermont crap was on the front page, titled "Gay Bashing: Vermont Style". Inside there is a picture of Ruth and her supporters waving, but it looks damn near close to them giving the Sieg Hiel salute, scary!!!!
How absolutely dreadfull! Ruth is no longer a player in state wide politics at this point. There may be others in the future who are equally odious, but I am confidant that they will be defeated.
Another bit of Ruth Dwyer trivia: in her hometown of Thetford, Dean's margin of victory was actually larger. Dean got 63% to Dwyer's 30%. This is largely due to what transpired during Dwyer's stint on Thetford's school board, where she managed to push through draconian budgit cuts which caused dammage that took years to repair. Thetford residents actually placed ads in newspapers statewide urging Vermonters to reject her.
Um...here's a good question: why the hell are we using punch cards still for something as important as an election? Shouldn't we be using technology that isn't 50 years old?
The problem is not that the technology is too old, it is that it is too complex. In Vermont, we have simple paper ballots with bubbles that you fill in with a #2 pencil. The way the ballots are designed, it is impossible to inadvertaintly vote for the wrong candidate, unless you are really stupid. It is also impossible for a machinacal defect to obscure the procedure, which was the real problem with those districts in Florida. Of course, in Vermont, you can vote even if you are a convicted felon (in fact, Billy Greer, currently in federal prison for drug trafficking, was on the ballot for US Congress in Vermont)
Happily, Ruth Dwyer, the Nazi/Republican candidate for governor of Vermont, was religated to the dustbin of history on election day. She was forced to admit, in her concession speach, that Vermonters don't appear to agree with her on the issues. She actually got a smaller percentage of the vote this year then she did two years ago, when she did not have the whole civil union issue to harp on.
I cannot imagine there being any vote fraud in this state, that may be my own rosy picture of my home, but I think that anything of that nature would be quickly discovered and there would be massive public outrage. The stories I am reading here suggests that in many places such fraud is rampant, and that's pretty sad, espacially if people are taking it as par for the course.
Progressive Taxation sounds great.... until the masses (with all the electoral votes and make less than you) decide that you should be on the heavily taxed. This is a slippery slope. Perhaps George Bush is doing the right thing.
Bullshit.
Progressive Taxation != Arbitrary Taxation.
Maybe it would be best to state an immaginary example. Say there are three households, A, B, and C. A earns $25,000, B earns $45k, and C earns $125k. Lets say the tax brackets are: 0% for the first $40k, 10% for the second $40k, 20% for the third, and so on.
A would pay 0% of its $25k.
B would pay %0 of its first $40k, and 10% of the $5k that excedes this, in total B would pay $500 in tax, which is approx. 1.1% of its total income.
C would pay 0% of its first $40k, 10% of its second $40k (or $4k), 20% of its third $40k (or $8k), and 30% of the remainder (or $1500), for a total of $13.5k in tax, which is 10.8% of its total income.
In reality the incriment would get slightly lower on each step so that the bracket percentage would approach but not excede some cap, like 95% or something. A houshold reaching that cap would be paying a much lower (then 95%) of their total income in tax, but for each additional $40k they made, they would be able to keep slightly less of that $40k. This would encourage CEO's of large corporations to invest more in, say, paying their employees, then in additional pay for themselves.
The current tax system in the USA is slightly progressive, but if it were to be plotted as a graph, it would be closer to "flat" then it would be to the one I describe above. Of course, we all know that the current system is needlessly complex, complexity is not necessary to inpliment a fair progressive tax system.
For the record, I do not feel really great about using the tax system as a carot/stick kinda thing to discourage vice, like Nader suggests, but I absolutely support a "steep" (as in what the graph would look like) progressive tax system.
The Viewsonic panel actually does have the correct aspect ratio for its native resolution (which is 1280 x 1024). Phisical screen size is 359mm (H) x 287mm (V), 1024/1280 is 0.8, and 287/359 is ~0.799. This is of course the wrong aspect ratio for any other common resolution, but what kind of fool runs an LCD in anything other then its native resolution?
The Mac that I bought actually came out of the box with 0 MB of ram (thats right, zero MB), no hard drive, and no graphics card. It was the Power Macintosh 9600 VAR edition, and it did include a floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, keyboard and mouse, but no other peripherals. The OS was included on CD, but of course it was necessary to add at least a little RAM and a graphics card to get it to boot off the CD. I wish Apple would bundle their current offerings in this manner, since they tend to overcharge on RAM and on hard drives.
As much as you might like to think so, you don't vote directly for presidents. Read up on the electoral college, and then maybe you'll understand why voting for Nader is a waste of time. You're just throwing your vote in the toilet.
Sorry to squash your idealism, but you don't have a clue.
See this page for a mathimatical model on how the electoral college actually gives more voting power to citizens. Regardless of that, if Nader gets >=5% of the popular vote, the Green Party gets "major party status" and is elegable for public funding in 2004 (just like the Reform Party is now).
I use iCab as my main browser (and i have managed to convince several other people to do likewise). It is what a browser should be, no extra crap like mail and news, and that is what makes it small and svelte. (not that a mail client needs, or even should be, all that large).
The article failed to mention that iCab lets you filter java applets and javascript in mostly the same ways that you can filter images. It also has a built in html checker which is really neat, if the page is "correct", it has a little smily face, if there are errors, there is a frouney face which you can click on to get a list of errors. Double click on one of the errors to highlight the relivent section of the source.
If you make a page that makes iCab smile, (like mine) iCab will put a link to it from their site if you email them about it.
What the Vermont Constitution has to say about this:
Every person of the full age of eighteen years who is a citizen of the United States, having resided in this State for the period established by the General Assembly and who is of a quiet and peaceable behavior, and will take the following oath or affirmation, shall be entitled to all the privileges of a voter of this state:
You solemnly swear (or affirm) that whenever you give your vote or suffrage, touching any matter that concerns the State of Vermont, you will do it so as in your conscience you shall judge will most conduce to the best good of the same, as established by the Constitution, without fear or favor of any person.
Many other posters have said this already, but I wanted to add my voice to list of people who say: Vote Nader!
You can also check out the site I am working for for People Over Profit, which is an indipendant political organization in Vermont that supports Ralph Nader for president.
The site will not be up for a few weeks, but it will be at www.peopleoverprofit.org. Once I have a presentable prototype it will be up on my personal site, and that should be today or tommorow.
It is obvious that you have no idea why Apples are so easy to use and consistant. One of the main reasons is because Apple has resisted adding unnecessary complexity to the interface. A secondary mouse button would be completely useless to the vast majority of users, and even those who would use it would do so much less frequently then they would use the primary mouse button. That is why a secondary mouse button should not be on the same logical level as a primary mouse button. Apple has performed extensive r&d on this issue and found that the solution is to use a modifier key on the keyboard for that functionality. The majority of people in the world have never touched a personal computer so your augument that users are more savy now is not quite true, even so, a user who wants or needs a more complex mouse interface has that option available to them. Most multi-button mice that are available for the Mac have as the default setting for the secondary button the function "control click", but you can modify that anyway you want. Actually pressing control and then clicking still does the standard thing, regardless of what you set the secondary button on the mouse to do.
As far as rigid standards go, as with most things, there is a time and a place. Apple has been pretty good at figuring out when a standard should be rigid, and when it should not. Apple has decided (correctly, in my opinion) that only one mouse button needs to be part of the rigid standard. (plus the "control click" function, which IS the secondary mouse button)
First of all, macs do have two mouse buttons, the second one is just on the keyboard, where it belongs. Your argument that most people know what to do with two (or three) mouse buttons is simply wrong, I know this because I work in tech support for an isp. Believe me, people have enough trouble with the concept of a mouse at all let alone distingishing between left and right mouse buttons. It is SO much eaiser to tell someone to "hold down control and click" then it is to say "right click". after they futilly try writing "click" all over the place I end up having to say "click once with the right side as opposed to the left side mouse button" and they still don't get it. People get "hold down control and click" the first time, every time.
For the record, I use a Kensington TurboMouse trackball on my Mac (PC version is called an ExpertMouse I think), it has four buttons and frankly, I would prefer to program the buttons to do what I want them to do rather then have Apple define a rigid standard.
I'd tell the iCab people to change their program, as it seems to have some erroneus ideas about table width elements.
I would not be supprised if there were some errors in the iCab error report function, since it is still beta, but it seems to get things right most of the time.
The browser even has a preferences setting for how to render tables and frames, you can make it behave like Netscape and IE, or you can make it behave correctly. In the case of that particular warning that I mentioned, it warns against percentage values in the width attribute for the td tag, but not for the width attribute for the table tag.
Chechnia is part of the Russian Commonwealth. Suppose the governement in DC wanted to deal with a group of rebels in California?
and Vermont; and Montana; and Texas; and Alaska; and New Hampshire; and in and around DC all at the same time?
If it came to the point of there being a group of rebels in California and they were not simply an isolated group of nuts or something, I would imagine that pockets of rebelion would turn up all over the place, and they would be in the home towns and cities of the members of the US military.
I tested several of the sites that they had listed with a red lock on four different browsers. iCab2.0 for Mac, MSIE4.0 for Mac, and NC4.7 for Mac all allowed me to go back to the previous site with minimal extra effort, i just had to press back a few times rapidly. IE5.0 for Windows would not go back from the homedepot.com site by any ammount of rapid clicking on the back button, but I could use the little pull down thingie next to the back button and select the previous page from the list and go back that way. What is the big deal?
Slashdot Mirror
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant.
Mr. Nolle is refering to economic theory, right? Well, it's not the internet's responsibility to conform to the theory, it's the theory that needs to be changed to conform to reality. Sheesh.
JavaScript needs to be supported, and turned on as well. I found this out with iCab on the mac, which must be set to say it is IE5 for Windows, and have JavaScript on for it to work. The mac version of Opera not only does not support JavaScript, it does not have iCab's flexability in terms of what you want it to have for the browser id. In iCab, you can set it to anything arbitrary string of characters. In Opera, you can choose "Identify as MSIE 5.0", and it will use the following string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 5.0 [en].
--
My tests with Mac OS 9.1 on my PowerBook G4...
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.5.1; Macintosh; I; PPC) and javascript off: Failed
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95) and javascript off: Failed
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC) and javascript off: Failed
MS IE 5 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)) javascript off: Failed
Netscape 4.7 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC)) javascript off: Failed
MS IE 5 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)) javascript on: Worked!
Netscape 4.7 for Mac, (browser id: Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC)) javascript on: Worked!
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.5.1; Macintosh; I; PPC) and javascript on: Failed
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95) and javascript on: Worked!
iCab, with browser id set to Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC) and javascript on: Failed (strange...)
Opera for Mac v5.0 tp3.298, set to "Identify as MSIE 5.0", which gives a browser id of: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 5.0 [en]: Failed (beta version, probably does not support javascript...)
--
Minor nit pick, it is not necessary for another bidder to "bid close to your high bid" in order to push you over the reserve price, if you bid higher then the reserve then the "current bid" will reflect the reserve price, regardless of the presence or absence of other bidders. What happened with the microscope is the sellers had their reserve price higher then what you put in for the maximum bid, but were ultimately willing to sell for lower then the reserve price.
I have bought a few things on ebay, and have delt with sellers "offline" who were clearly manuplating the reserve price in order to avoid ebay fees. Clearly it is pretty silly for a seller to do this in the long term, but people do it. What ebay should do is just make it clear that any transaction not within ebay's purview is "at your own risk." (of course, that is the case with any ebay transaction anyway.)
Yes, we Americans are pretty stupid. You would think the sight of nudity would make us melt like the wicked witch of the west or something. If a TV show on a broadcast network or standard cable so much as shows half an ass they need to have a disclaimer. Hopefully one of the canadian channels that we get on cable here in northern Vermont will carry the uncut version. We do get exposed to an occasional boob on CFCF 12. With my luck I will have to watch it in French.
--
It is supposed to be much more faithfull to the book then the David Lynch movie. Review of the series here.
--
Oh my god! So glad there is another slashdotter that agrees with me on how insane Ruth Dwyer is! I was getting so sick of all of the "Take Back Vermont" bullshit going on in VT, this certainly is way far from the Vermont I grew up in and love.
Likewise!
Fortunately, Vermonters appear to agree with us on this, out of a record setting voter turnout 51% voted for the incumbant Democrat Dean, who supports civil unions, 10% voted for the Progressive candidate Anthony Pollina, who supports full scale gay marrage, and 38% voted for Dwyer. Many of the Dwyer voters cast their vote for her because of her opposition to the school funding law and could care less about civil unions. Many people who don't like civil unions voted for Dean or Pollina because they are simply tired of the divisions caused by the issue, and the classic "live and let live" attitude toward persional freedom that Vermonters are famous for won over in their minds.
The Republicans did manage to take the Vermont House, but the Senate maintained a (very slim) Democratic majority. I think it is safe to say that not much is going to get done legislatively in the next two years.
Today in the Boston Phoenix, Ruth Dwyer and the Take Back Vermont crap was on the front page, titled "Gay Bashing: Vermont Style". Inside there is a picture of Ruth and her supporters waving, but it looks damn near close to them giving the Sieg Hiel salute, scary!!!!
How absolutely dreadfull! Ruth is no longer a player in state wide politics at this point. There may be others in the future who are equally odious, but I am confidant that they will be defeated.
Another bit of Ruth Dwyer trivia: in her hometown of Thetford, Dean's margin of victory was actually larger. Dean got 63% to Dwyer's 30%. This is largely due to what transpired during Dwyer's stint on Thetford's school board, where she managed to push through draconian budgit cuts which caused dammage that took years to repair. Thetford residents actually placed ads in newspapers statewide urging Vermonters to reject her.
--
Um...here's a good question: why the hell are we using punch cards still for something as important as an election? Shouldn't we be using technology that isn't 50 years old?
The problem is not that the technology is too old, it is that it is too complex. In Vermont, we have simple paper ballots with bubbles that you fill in with a #2 pencil. The way the ballots are designed, it is impossible to inadvertaintly vote for the wrong candidate, unless you are really stupid. It is also impossible for a machinacal defect to obscure the procedure, which was the real problem with those districts in Florida. Of course, in Vermont, you can vote even if you are a convicted felon (in fact, Billy Greer, currently in federal prison for drug trafficking, was on the ballot for US Congress in Vermont)
Happily, Ruth Dwyer, the Nazi/Republican candidate for governor of Vermont, was religated to the dustbin of history on election day. She was forced to admit, in her concession speach, that Vermonters don't appear to agree with her on the issues. She actually got a smaller percentage of the vote this year then she did two years ago, when she did not have the whole civil union issue to harp on.
I cannot imagine there being any vote fraud in this state, that may be my own rosy picture of my home, but I think that anything of that nature would be quickly discovered and there would be massive public outrage. The stories I am reading here suggests that in many places such fraud is rampant, and that's pretty sad, espacially if people are taking it as par for the course.
one *million* dollars (holding my pinkie to my lip)...
Progressive Taxation sounds great.... until the masses (with all the electoral votes and make less than you) decide that you should be on the heavily taxed. This is a slippery slope. Perhaps George Bush is doing the right thing.
Bullshit.
Progressive Taxation != Arbitrary Taxation.
Maybe it would be best to state an immaginary example. Say there are three households, A, B, and C. A earns $25,000, B earns $45k, and C earns $125k. Lets say the tax brackets are: 0% for the first $40k, 10% for the second $40k, 20% for the third, and so on.
A would pay 0% of its $25k.
B would pay %0 of its first $40k, and 10% of the $5k that excedes this, in total B would pay $500 in tax, which is approx. 1.1% of its total income.
C would pay 0% of its first $40k, 10% of its second $40k (or $4k), 20% of its third $40k (or $8k), and 30% of the remainder (or $1500), for a total of $13.5k in tax, which is 10.8% of its total income.
In reality the incriment would get slightly lower on each step so that the bracket percentage would approach but not excede some cap, like 95% or something. A houshold reaching that cap would be paying a much lower (then 95%) of their total income in tax, but for each additional $40k they made, they would be able to keep slightly less of that $40k. This would encourage CEO's of large corporations to invest more in, say, paying their employees, then in additional pay for themselves.
The current tax system in the USA is slightly progressive, but if it were to be plotted as a graph, it would be closer to "flat" then it would be to the one I describe above. Of course, we all know that the current system is needlessly complex, complexity is not necessary to inpliment a fair progressive tax system.
For the record, I do not feel really great about using the tax system as a carot/stick kinda thing to discourage vice, like Nader suggests, but I absolutely support a "steep" (as in what the graph would look like) progressive tax system.
Go to www.booksense.com, and buy from your local bookstore.
Understanding Comics in hardcover and paperback.
The Viewsonic panel actually does have the correct aspect ratio for its native resolution (which is 1280 x 1024). Phisical screen size is 359mm (H) x 287mm (V), 1024/1280 is 0.8, and 287/359 is ~0.799. This is of course the wrong aspect ratio for any other common resolution, but what kind of fool runs an LCD in anything other then its native resolution?
The Mac that I bought actually came out of the box with 0 MB of ram (thats right, zero MB), no hard drive, and no graphics card. It was the Power Macintosh 9600 VAR edition, and it did include a floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, keyboard and mouse, but no other peripherals. The OS was included on CD, but of course it was necessary to add at least a little RAM and a graphics card to get it to boot off the CD. I wish Apple would bundle their current offerings in this manner, since they tend to overcharge on RAM and on hard drives.
As much as you might like to think so, you don't vote directly for presidents. Read up on the electoral college, and then maybe you'll understand why voting for Nader is a waste of time. You're just throwing your vote in the toilet.
Sorry to squash your idealism, but you don't have a clue.
See this page for a mathimatical model on how the electoral college actually gives more voting power to citizens. Regardless of that, if Nader gets >=5% of the popular vote, the Green Party gets "major party status" and is elegable for public funding in 2004 (just like the Reform Party is now).
I use iCab as my main browser (and i have managed to convince several other people to do likewise). It is what a browser should be, no extra crap like mail and news, and that is what makes it small and svelte. (not that a mail client needs, or even should be, all that large).
The article failed to mention that iCab lets you filter java applets and javascript in mostly the same ways that you can filter images. It also has a built in html checker which is really neat, if the page is "correct", it has a little smily face, if there are errors, there is a frouney face which you can click on to get a list of errors. Double click on one of the errors to highlight the relivent section of the source.
If you make a page that makes iCab smile, (like mine) iCab will put a link to it from their site if you email them about it.
What the Vermont Constitution has to say about this:
Every person of the full age of eighteen years who is a citizen of the United States, having resided in this State for the period established by the General Assembly and who is of a quiet and peaceable behavior, and will take the following oath or affirmation, shall be entitled to all the privileges of a voter of this state:
You solemnly swear (or affirm) that whenever you give your vote or suffrage, touching any matter that concerns the State of Vermont, you will do it so as in your conscience you shall judge will most conduce to the best good of the same, as established by the Constitution, without fear or favor of any person.
Violate that oath and loose your right to vote.
Macromedia's response.
Many other posters have said this already, but I wanted to add my voice to list of people who say: Vote Nader!
You can also check out the site I am working for for People Over Profit, which is an indipendant political organization in Vermont that supports Ralph Nader for president.
The site will not be up for a few weeks, but it will be at www.peopleoverprofit.org. Once I have a presentable prototype it will be up on my personal site, and that should be today or tommorow.
blah blah blah blah blah....
It is obvious that you have no idea why Apples are so easy to use and consistant. One of the main reasons is because Apple has resisted adding unnecessary complexity to the interface. A secondary mouse button would be completely useless to the vast majority of users, and even those who would use it would do so much less frequently then they would use the primary mouse button. That is why a secondary mouse button should not be on the same logical level as a primary mouse button. Apple has performed extensive r&d on this issue and found that the solution is to use a modifier key on the keyboard for that functionality. The majority of people in the world have never touched a personal computer so your augument that users are more savy now is not quite true, even so, a user who wants or needs a more complex mouse interface has that option available to them. Most multi-button mice that are available for the Mac have as the default setting for the secondary button the function "control click", but you can modify that anyway you want. Actually pressing control and then clicking still does the standard thing, regardless of what you set the secondary button on the mouse to do.
As far as rigid standards go, as with most things, there is a time and a place. Apple has been pretty good at figuring out when a standard should be rigid, and when it should not. Apple has decided (correctly, in my opinion) that only one mouse button needs to be part of the rigid standard. (plus the "control click" function, which IS the secondary mouse button)
I respectfully disagree.
First of all, macs do have two mouse buttons, the second one is just on the keyboard, where it belongs. Your argument that most people know what to do with two (or three) mouse buttons is simply wrong, I know this because I work in tech support for an isp. Believe me, people have enough trouble with the concept of a mouse at all let alone distingishing between left and right mouse buttons. It is SO much eaiser to tell someone to "hold down control and click" then it is to say "right click". after they futilly try writing "click" all over the place I end up having to say "click once with the right side as opposed to the left side mouse button" and they still don't get it. People get "hold down control and click" the first time, every time.
For the record, I use a Kensington TurboMouse trackball on my Mac (PC version is called an ExpertMouse I think), it has four buttons and frankly, I would prefer to program the buttons to do what I want them to do rather then have Apple define a rigid standard.
I'd tell the iCab people to change their program, as it seems to have some erroneus ideas about table width elements.
I would not be supprised if there were some errors in the iCab error report function, since it is still beta, but it seems to get things right most of the time.
The browser even has a preferences setting for how to render tables and frames, you can make it behave like Netscape and IE, or you can make it behave correctly. In the case of that particular warning that I mentioned, it warns against percentage values in the width attribute for the td tag, but not for the width attribute for the table tag.
I checked your site in iCab and it does report one error/warning in the html on your page:
Warning (20/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" should only contain absolute pixel values.
The page does seem to render fine in iCab, though.
Chechnia is part of the Russian Commonwealth. Suppose the governement in DC wanted to deal with a group of rebels in California?
and Vermont; and Montana; and Texas; and Alaska; and New Hampshire; and in and around DC all at the same time?
If it came to the point of there being a group of rebels in California and they were not simply an isolated group of nuts or something, I would imagine that pockets of rebelion would turn up all over the place, and they would be in the home towns and cities of the members of the US military.
I tested several of the sites that they had listed with a red lock on four different browsers. iCab2.0 for Mac, MSIE4.0 for Mac, and NC4.7 for Mac all allowed me to go back to the previous site with minimal extra effort, i just had to press back a few times rapidly. IE5.0 for Windows would not go back from the homedepot.com site by any ammount of rapid clicking on the back button, but I could use the little pull down thingie next to the back button and select the previous page from the list and go back that way. What is the big deal?
according to his website he is planning to launch in April 2001. Would that be April first?