I just read that an appeals court has ruled that the ADA does not apply to websites. This is amazingly stupid and the judges who made this decision should turn in their robes. The whole point of the ADA and Section 508 was to be an anticipatory set of laws to apply broadly in an [...]
As a webmaster, I’d been using Mozilla since version 0.7 and Opera since version 3 to design and test with. I’d build for Mozilla first and then tweak things so they worked in Internet Explorer vesion 5, which at the time most people had. This has been my pattern until the present day: design in [...]
Over at Digital Web Magazine, there is an article about merging CSS with content managment applications. The article is short on technical detail but does describe various different interfaces and goals to be reached. Opera, Mozilla and Firefox (And for all I know Konqueror and Safari can too.) can all zoom web content better than [...]
Computers in the movies are much more noisy and visually exciting than in real life. The truth is that computer crime is visually very boring to watch. The criminal just sits there switching between prompts and editors typing in cryptic commands and getting getting very terse output as feedback. All that’s heard is the tick [...]
The DOE has developed a small, self-contained nuclear power plant called SSTAR. The plan is that these would be sold to developing nations to meet their growing electricity needs while at the same time reducing the danger of nuclear proliferation and stolen fuel. The units are designed to be essentially nuclear batteries. You just move [...]
Just came across a BBC article about a new desalination technology being used in Israel. This is a good thing, hopefully removing a bone of contention in violent region of the world.
There was this documentary series I saw on public television back in the early Eighties, I think it was called “Fast Forward” or something. It was terribly prescient and had a very avid view of information technology–computers, networks, telecommunications. Years later and the future that the series pundits (I think they even had a young [...]
The last few entries were sort of environmental downers. I still stick by them though. In my most ridiculous daydreams, I imagine all of humanity forcably relocated to space colonies made out of ferrous asteriods. The Earth could then be restored to something close to what it used to be before we appeared on the [...]
I haven’t really been paying attention these last few weeks but a lot of interest is being generated on the sites I read (CRN, WorldChanging, Cyborg Democracy) about something called a Fab Lab. As near as I can understand, a Fab Lab is an inexpensive (Well–around 20,000 dollars–so it’s actually very expensive for places like [...]
I guess I am a disillusioned environmentalist. I’d like to see the Earth totally unspoiled by any human activity but realistically I know that this is mostly a loosing battle. We may recycle, telecommuting and delivery may allow us to drive a lot less, we may drive cars with hybrid powerplants, we may consume less [...]