Once again, it’s BlogIRC time. IRC server irc.skunkworks.cx, port 6667, channel #blogirc.

Should’ve heeded my own implicit warning from yesterday. I just downloaded and installed Netscape 6 Preview 1, clicked on the Edit menu, selected “Preferences…”, clicked on the “Fonts” selector, and then before the panel had appeared, I clicked on the “Appearance” selector. The next thing I saw:

I just tried to send this to Netscape as a problem report, and when I clicked on the submit button, I got “Server Error This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server’s error log.” I give up; they can have their browser.

As expected, the CSS support is terribly wanting; look at the way that the navbar on the left of this page is rendered in IE or Opera 4.0, and then look at it in Netscape. (Opera also has problems, by the way.)

Michael Moore has a very well-written letter to Elian Gonzalez on his website; I found it via my referrers log despite the fact that it doesn’t link to me, and thus couldn’t have referred people to me. (Ed’s Weblog is also in my referrers log today, and also points to Michael Moore’s letter, so I can only assume that someone’s browser got confused somewhere between Ed and I.)

Dahlia Lithwick, in yesterday’s Breakfast Table:

The problem with our Internet society is that no one knows how to really objectify anyone properly anymore.

The cynic in me thinks that the reason that Judge Penfield Jackson wants to fast-track a Microsoft appeal directly to the Supreme Court is because last time one of his rulings on Microsoft went before the Appeals Court directly above him, he was unanimously overturned, the panel accusing Jackson of “a clear abuse of
discretion or an exercise of wholly non-existent discretion.”

MSNBC agrees with me:

Should Jackson decide to send the case to the Supreme Court, it could be viewed as a boon to the Justice Department and the 19 states that have sued Microsoft, because it would bypass the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. The appeals court in 1998 dealt the Justice Department a major defeat in an earlier, related Microsoft case.

Thank goodness that there are checks in place to prevent Jackson from using this purely to avoid being put in his place by the D.C. Court of Appeals; the Solicitor General, the Attorney General, and possibly, the President all need to approve the fast-track schedule, and the Supreme Court needs to agree to hear the case (rather than remand it back to the Appeals Court).

Speaking of being overturned, source code was ruled to be speech protected by the First Amendment yesterday, and the matter was remanded back to the U.S. District Judge who had ruled otherwise two years ago. (I wonder what it feels like as a judge when the court above you sends a matter back to you, telling you that you were wrong. Sort of like being yelled at by your boss in front of co-workers, I’d bet.)